Practice Mapping
Definition
"The Practice Mapping project aims to expose the interaction dynamics involved in a practice. It is, however, not only interested in the static network of the entities involved in the practice, but also, and perhaps even more so, in the dynamics of this network: how it grows and transforms over time".[1]
History
"The Practice Mapping project, a project to be situated at the intersection of art and science, was developed during the Interactivos? LABoral: When Process Becomes Paradigm workshop, from April 8 till April 20, 2010. This workshop took place at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, which has been steadily acquiring international acclaim for its relentless exploration of the intersections of art, science and technology, since its opening in 2007 in Gijón in Spain".[2]
Definition
Mapping one’s practice, be it technology or not — how they act, do, preform themselves and their fields over time.
History
Practice Mapping is the name of an experiment+project conducted during the Interactivos? Process as Paradigm workshop by LABoral and Medialab-Prado. It aimed to combine scientific and artistic methodologies to collect data on, analyse, and create representations of the interaction dynamics of the process the dynamics of the network of practice: how it grows and transforms over time.
Methodology
Practice Mapping proposes a three-part methodology consisting of data collection and integration; documentation and representation; and confrontation and reflection.
Contact Patterns Part 2
The following movie visualizes the social interactions between the participants of a recent workshop at Villa Gualino. The visualized data is obtained through a distributed sensing platform. This platform uses active RFID technology to detect “contacts” during which participants are both near each other and are facing each other.
If such configuration is sustained for longer than a few seconds, then this generally indicates that some form of social interaction is taking place. Next to the actual contacts, the platform also infers where these contacts take place. An earlier post in this blog provides more details on the technical set-up and the objectives of this project.
Note however that we here use the peer-to-peer contact detection scheme detailed in this subsequent post. More details about this are provided in a manuscript available at [arxiv.org/abs/0811.4170 http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.4170].
Source: http://www.vimeo.com/2410580
Data Collection and Integration
The project will use the SocioPatterns platform, a spatial proximity and face-to-face contact-sensing platform. Using active-RFID tags, strategically placed on relevant objects (such as computers, copiers, coffee-machines), locations (such as work and resting spaces), and people (workshop participants, tutors, collaborators), we plan to collect data on face-to-face contacts and/or proximity among the tagged entities. The result will be a comprehensive and temporally fine-grained record of the interaction network and its dynamics over the course of the workshop.
Additionally, we will provide a computer interface to log and annotate events, and add relevant links among tagged entities. This logging platform can be further extended using twitter or similar systems, meant to collect information on memes and the introduction and propagation of ideas and trends during the workshop.
Documentation and Representation
The collected and integrated data will serve as the source material for the representations we plan to work on during the workshop. Building on tools and technologies developed in the context of the SocioPatterns project (e.g. real-time dynamic network vizualizations), the KnowledgeCartography project and elsewhere, we plan to experiment with various static, dynamic and/or interactive formats for visualizing the practice.
Confrontation and Reflection
The third component of the proposed methodology concerns the confrontation of the workshop participants with the representations, which should act as mirrors that reflect their embedding in the interactional dynamics. This confrontation could be documented by means of video recordings of the participants that narrate their point-of-view with respect to the represented interactional dynamics. These documents will serve to further contextualize the representations, not only enabling the (non-participating) public to observe the impact of the confrontation and reflection, but also further expose and convey the processual nature of the creative activities that took place during the workshop.
References
